Down on the field in the Yale Bowl, among the thousands of athletes taking part in the opening ceremonies of the 1995 World Special Olympics Games, a photographer saw a group of athletes, in African dress, raising disposable cameras to their eyes.

But there was something wrong. They were holding the cameras backward as they peered at a faraway President Bill Clinton, Special Olympics International chairman Tim Shriver recounts in his new book, "Fully Alive: Discovering What Matters Most."

The photographer asked the athletes if they were trying to get a picture of the president. They just looked at him. He took the camera and showed them the right way to hold it to take a picture.

He thought he was helping.

"Oh," Shriver recounts one of the athletes saying. "Thank you, sir. But may I show you something? If you turn the camera around and hold your eye up to the viewfinder and look backward, it still works. It works like a telescope and you can see the president very clearly. So we're using these little cameras so we can get a good view of the president. But thank you for helping us."

The photographer, Shriver writes, was speechless.

"He assumed," he writes, "that his own knowledge as a professional was superior, that a 'disabled' man needed his help. But the man standing in front of him wasn't incompetent or stupid at all."

He goes on: "Who was changed in this moment? Who was 'disabled' and who was 'gifted?' Who gave and who received?"

The answer, Shriver continues, is both. And that begins to sum up Shriver's experience with Special Olympics, which began in his family's backyard at Camp Shriver in Maryland with his mother, the late Eunice Kennedy Shriver, the founder of Special Olympics, and continues to this day.

Shriver, 55, lives in Washington with his wife and five children. But it was in Connecticut that he came of age, where he went to college, got married and started his family as well as his involvement as an adult with Special Olympics.

"Connecticut was the place I kind of learned what I thought my mission was in the world," Shriver said this past week. "It was the first place I fell in love with education. The first time I went into a classroom [as a student teacher] was Lee High School [in New Haven]. I was a junior in college.

"To me, Connecticut is home even though I haven't lived here in 18 years."

Shriver went to Yale. He worked for UConn with an Upward Bound program, mentoring high-risk, high-potential youths in Hartford and New Haven. He taught at Hillhouse High in New Haven. He got his doctorate at UConn. He played on one of the inaugural Unified softball teams — in which non-disabled people partner with physically or developmentally disabled people to play sports — with Beau Doherty as his coach. Doherty is now the president of Special Olympics Connecticut.

"He kind of fought me a little bit on some Unified stuff when I first came here," said Doherty, who pioneered Unified Sports. "But once he played — we had some great athletes and partners — when he came out of that, once he took over Special Olympics, that was it. He's been the social inclusion guy. That's been his mantra. I think his experience on that team was the game-breaker."

Eunice Shriver, sister of President John F. Kennedy, wasn't completely enraptured with Unified Sports initially. When Doherty first pitched the idea to her, she was afraid the non-disabled participants would take away the focus from the disabled participants. But when she realized everybody was benefiting from the arrangement, she warmed up to it, just like her son did. Now, Unified Sports are offered in many Connecticut high schools.

Shriver remembered the New Haven softball team in his book. It had a rivalry against the team from Waterbury, whose best player was King Davis, a person with an intellectual disability. One day, Davis hit a ball hard at Shriver, who was playing second base. The ball had a spin on it and bounced up, hitting Shriver in the face hard and knocking him down. There was blood, but after he realized he wasn't missing any teeth and his nose wasn't broken, Shriver got up and returned to his position at second, where Davis stood.

"Nice hit," Shriver said to him.

"We're going to kick your ass in States this year, buddy," Davis replied.

Shriver was shocked. Hadn't he just seen Shriver lying on the ground? Weren't Special Olympics athletes supposed to be nice? Non-competitive, even?

Then Shriver came to a realization — that Davis was a softball player, and when the game was going on, he was a competitive athlete.

"I've long remembered that moment because it reminds me that no stereotype fits people with intellectual disabilities," he writes. "Stereotyping isn't wrong because it's politically incorrect; it's wrong because it's factually incorrect."

Shriver cites example after example throughout the book of Special Olympians who taught him to think differently about himself, about how he went into his job thinking he was going to give something to the athletes but found instead they gave way more back and showed him a new, clearer way of thinking.

"I wrote it because the culture wasn't giving people honest answers about how to find their purpose and how to feel fulfilled in life," he said. "The culture was saying, 'Become a celebrity. Become rich. Become famous. Get a new iPhone. Get a new boyfriend. Get a new playlist. And you'll feel fulfilled.'

"Celebrity, money and power — I grew up having all those things and not feeling like any of them contributed to feeling purposeful or meaningful or really happy in a deep and lasting way. Instead, I was finding all those things in very unlikely places. Teenagers at Hillhouse and Special Olympics athletes were making me feel much more profound and deep and giving me a meaningful sense of my own mission."

He went on: "I kept trying to tell people, 'You won't believe this, you should come meet these athletes and they'd be like, 'Oh that's so nice, that's so sweet that you do that.' And I was like, 'No, that's not it. It's not nice, it's not sweet. There's a place where you can find your life here, you can discover who you really are. You can feel like you're fully alive.' And they said, 'Oh, you know, that's so nice, do you work on cancer, too?' And I said, 'No, you don't get it. I'm not explaining it right.'

"So I had to explain it [in the book] and I had to use myself as a subject. I couldn't say that King Davis for the Waterbury Unified softball team was a role model to me unless I could explain what he meant to me."

Doherty hopes the message of the book resonates with people.

"We're lucky to have someone who's so gifted, who can deliver what we do for a living," Doherty said. "We can't articulate it the way he does, and if we don't get [the word about the book] out there, we're not doing our jobs."